Countries: Indonesia
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Physical scarring and damage to a woman's face and body meant she no longer fit within a certain "beauty paradigm" on how women should look, she added" (Para 31). Societal beauty standards create rigid norms, where scarring lead to stigma, impacting women's well-being and social acceptance (UST - CODERS COMMENT).

Countries: Indonesia
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Physical scarring and damage to a woman's face and body meant she no longer fit within a certain "beauty paradigm" on how women should look, she added" (Para 31). Societal beauty standards create rigid norms, where scarring lead to stigma, impacting women's well-being and social acceptance (UST - CODERS COMMENT).

Countries: Indonesia
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Physical scarring and damage to a woman's face and body meant she no longer fit within a certain "beauty paradigm" on how women should look, she added" (Para 31). Societal beauty standards create rigid norms, where scarring lead to stigma, impacting women's well-being and social acceptance (UST - CODERS COMMENT).

Countries: Indonesia
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Physical scarring and damage to a woman's face and body meant she no longer fit within a certain "beauty paradigm" on how women should look, she added" (Para 31). Societal beauty standards create rigid norms, where scarring lead to stigma, impacting women's well-being and social acceptance (UST - CODERS COMMENT).

Countries: India
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Matrimonial adverts – where families look for suitable matches for arranged marriages – often stipulate a “beautiful, fair-skinned, thin” woman as a wife. When marriage is presented as an ultimate goal for women, they are compelled to adhere to the feminine norms of beauty. The glorification of a slim body shape is also rooted in the colonial legacy where normative white bodies have been idealised" (par. 9). "In collectivist societies, women are expected to focus on others, not on themselves. When women are cooking and serving, as they do in the majority of Indian families, what and how much they are eating can be ignored. There is also a stigma...more

Countries: Japan
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"At Shinagawa Station, ads equate cosmetic surgery with social validation, as observed by Mika Kobayashi, author of 'Advertising Observations from a Gendered Perspective' (title translated from Japanese). Some adverts suggest that women should 'get breast implants if (they) want a Birkin bag,' referring to the coveted Hermes accessory selling for over $10,000. At Takadanobaba Station, host club billboards exhort potential customers to visit only once they have gotten implants, reinforcing the narrative that physical changes can earn women the money to spend on male hosts" (par. 14-15).

Countries: South Korea
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

“As she grew older, Youngmi found herself depressed, unsure of what her future held, and financially unstable. In Korea’s patriarchal society — in which women are generally expected to defer to their fathers and to adhere to rigid beauty standards — she felt like a perpetual victim, obsessed by the wrongs done to her by her father and pressured into maintaining her appearance in order to please men. Despite her meager budget as a nursing student, she purchased new clothes each season, spending a lot of money on cheap, poor-quality clothes from H&M. She wore makeup religiously. ‘I could not go outside without any makeup. I felt ashamed of my...more

Countries: Indonesia
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"[S]ome women who were pressured to cover their heads had reported the symptoms of body dysmorphic disorder, sometimes called dysmorphophobia, which is characterized by the obsessive idea that they feel parts of their bodies, in this case their covered heads, are flawed" (79).

Countries: Jordan
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"In Middle Eastern countries like Jordan, 60.7% of women use skin bleaching creams. These products are often laced with mercury, and can cause liver damage" (para 15).

Countries: United States
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"We live in an era where the most famous people on the planet are icons for an unattainable beauty standard. The Kardashians — reality TV royalty — downplay their cosmetic surgeries and incredibly expensive beauty interventions in favor of a 'female empowerment' and wellness narrative, claiming they simply 'get up and work hard'...And what women around the world have learned is that success and female empowerment looks like the Kardashians. The normalization of plastic surgery has gone hand in hand with that" (para 1-3). An article published in Glamour quoted a 30-year-old woman who felt nonsurgical procedures like fillers and Botox were simply another expected expense, like bikini waxes, explaining,...more

Countries: Argentina
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Dominant beauty standards in Argentina exalt thin, young, white, manicured, and sculpted female bodies. These cultural norms permeate...through key institutions, including the media and the family, and...economic imperatives promoting industries such as fashion, tourism, or other jobs that require women's buena presencia (good appearance) as a condition for work" (136-137).

Countries: South Korea
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1, ERBG-PRACTICE-3, ERBG-DATA-1, CRPLB-PRACTICE-1, GIC-LAW-1, GIC-LAW-3

"For example, in January 2021, the Seoul city government uploaded guidance for pregnant women to make sure to check if there is plenty of toilet paper in the house, make meals for husbands, and to pay attention to their looks by hanging smaller size clothes to motivate themselves to lose weight after giving birth. And the discrimination against pregnant women begins long before the actual pregnancy. In hiring processes, interviewers routinely ask women invasive questions about their plans to get pregnant, with some openly telling female candidates it would be difficult to hire them because the company does not want to pay for maternity leave. According to a local survey,...more

Countries: Senegal
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"Ms. Sy grew up in a traditional Fulani family. She started writing 'Mistress of a Married Man' as a serial novel on a group Facebook page; it was later picked up by a production company called Marodi TV[...]Ms. Sy’s characters, at her direction, favor Senegalese designers — wearing fluted blouses and colorful prints from NuNu and Sisters of Afrika — and natural hairstyles; they reject the practice of skin bleaching. They also speak Wolof, the language preferred by many in what is officially a Francophone nation"(para 19,21).

Countries: Mauritania
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

“Girls of a West African nation [Mauritania] are forced to consume up to 16,000 calories a day in a bid to make them gain weight so they appear more 'attractive' to men" (para 1). “In the West African culture because bigger women are deemed more beautiful, girls as young as eleven are being force fed to make them fat and more desirable to men. Pictured, a girl is made to eat a large bowl of grain. Sahar visits other feeding camps where girls as young as five and six, like the one above, are being fed larger portions to start stretching their stomachs for when they're older” (caption photo 1)....more

Countries: Iraq
Variables: PHBP-PRACTICE-1

"In 2008, graffiti on the walls in the city of Basra threatened, 'Your makeup and your decision to forgo the headscarf will bring you death'" (para 5).